Files, such as LOB files, serve the goal of providing a content-rich store for unstructured data. Some applications give rise to the duplicated storage of LOB data, and thereby waste a significant amount of storage space. The ability to identify LOBs that have identical content and for those LOBs to share a single data repository is therefore desirable.
LOB data, residing in mainline or archived storage devices, can grow into very large sizes. This provides disk space and disk management challenges to administrators. Data compression is a commonly used mechanism to minimize disk space requirements. It is thus desirable to compress LOB data and provide random access to compressed data. In existing approaches, an algorithm is used to compress or decompress a source LOB to a destination LOB. The destination LOB is either a temporary LOB or an existing LOB, in which case it is overwritten. This technique requires creation of an explicit destination LOB and does not provide random access to LOB data.
Another problem with existing technique for storing LOB data is that the LOB data is stored unencrypted on-disk. However, in many cases, securing sensitive information is critical for meeting business and compliance requirements.